The Traveling Death and Resurrection Show - Ariel Gore [64]
I wrap my fingers around Tony’s arm. “You couldn’t have known this would happen.”
He cries into his hands. “She knew.”
An old man paces in the waiting room. Other terrors are unfolding here in other white rooms.
Paula enters with the slim stranger from the Hermosa Beach Playhouse, and they take the two empty seats next to Tony.
The stranger smiles at me. “I’m a friend of Paula’s.”
I nod.
Tony says, “Manny’s going to die.”
“Who shall we pray to?” Barbaro wants to know. He holds out a pair of crutches, looks at me like I’m going to have an answer.
“I don’t know.”
He touches my forehead as I stand. “Of course you know,” he says. “You are Saint Cat.”
As if it were so simple. The real thing pretending to be a fraud. Maybe he sees through me. Or maybe he’s just hoping because what we need right now is a saint.
“He’s going to die,” Tony says again.
“Shut up,” Paula snaps. “Haven’t you ever heard of positive thinking?”
Barbaro looks up at me, and I wish I had some magic trick to make all this suffering go away. “We should pray,” he insists.
In the white hallway outside Manny’s room, I lean on my crutches. The seven of us join hands in a semicircle. We watch through that thick glass. Beep, beep, beep.
Everyone’s looking at me like I’m the one in charge here, so I guess I am. “I’ll tell you a story.”
Padre Pio
(IF YOU NEED A MIRACLE HEALING)
A.K.A. Pio of Pietrelcina
FEAST DAY: September 23
SYMBOLS: a rosary, fiery skies
In a mountain town in southern Italy near the place the Black Madonna of the Poor once appeared in an oak tree, Francesco Forgione was born to a poor farming family in 1887. The whole area was known for its healers, but also for its poverty. After years of crop failures, many of the town’s men went to America looking for steady wages.
A daddy’s boy, Francesco was heartbroken when his own father left home to work on the Erie Railroad. Forlorn, the seven-year-old told his mother he wanted to become a monk. Maybe he could replace his father with The Father. But Orazio Forgione wasn’t off working in America so his kids could be illiterate like he was. Francesco could be a monk, fair enough—he could even be a priest—but first he’d be educated. Francesco stayed in school, but he was a quirky little thing. Never quite fit in. He prayed like a maniac, secretly went without food or drink for days on end. He was barely nine years old when his mom discovered that he’d been sleeping on the floor with a stone for a pillow. The kids at school called him “macaroni without salt”—he couldn’t run, couldn’t jump, couldn’t climb trees. What was he good for? “No one knows what will become of Francesco,” the town priest said.
Macaroni without salt, maybe, but Francesco soon discovered his healing powers. As a young teenager, he received a gift of some chestnuts from a neighbor woman, returned the cloth bag they came in. The woman sensed something magical about the boy, so she saved the bag. When a barn explosion left her seriously injured, she placed the bag on her wound, and, miraculously, she was healed.
When Francesco finally left home to follow his dreams of Capuchin monkhood, he took the name Pio, but he was put out of one monastery and then another for refusing to eat. When he got back home, he was delighted to see his family and friends—and they him—but it